


vanishing point

by Iambic



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene, and an incomplete complement of the crew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 20:35:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/pseuds/Iambic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's easy to forget that the Normandy is just a ship, and that Shepard is just a man -- and as such, neither are invulnerable. (Takes place immediately after the beginning of ME2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	vanishing point

Kaidan's got an escape pod full of noncombatants and all frequencies open, looking for assistance, is anyone out there, does someone hear? He's got to keep it together, but he looks back anyway and it's in time to see the Normandy disintegrate, hull snapping and plating floating apart like a slow motion explosion. Some of the smaller pieces of debris could be people. He has to turn away again before his eyes adjust and let him know. He has to man this vessel. And he'll have to have it together, for these people, and for Shepard, later, because Shepard won't have looked away, he'll know exactly who got spaced. He'll know their faces and their homeworlds and he'll call their families himself. He won't even consider that some things, it's better not to know. Sometimes those details are just something else to keep him up at night. 

"I didn't think," says one of the pod's other passengers -- Alvarez, from down in engineering -- and Kaidan has to come back to himself, back to now. They're still not safe yet. "I mean, this is -- was -- the Normandy. You know. A legend. How does it end up like this?"

"She was the best damn ship in the galaxy." Kaidan doesn't know this guy at all -- one of the new staff, after the last few changeovers. But he's seen the kid around. Shepard probably spoke to him already. Kaidan will have to ask, later. "I guess not anymore."

They're looking at him, now, and well, maybe that makes sense. He's the veteran, the senior officer in this pod; he's Commander Shepard's friend. Somehow. "This -- it's just a setback. The Normandy was a good ship, but the crew is what made her great. Shepard made her great. We have to focus on what we can do." He's never been the best motivational speaker, but conversationally at least, he can make himself sound like he knows what he's talking about. They nod. They believe it too. Shepard will pull them all through. 

The initial blast pushed them out of orbit, away from the other pods. Then it's a three-hour drift, whittled away by tense, abrupt conversations that lapse into tense, elongated silence, and they say to each other the same thing over and over. The Alliance will come. Shepard will know what to do. Sometimes Kaidan doesn't catch himself in time, and looks out at the wreckage drifting apart, getting pulled down into that gravity well behind their pod. The Normandy's resting ground, an unmarked grave. Ash would've had a line for this. Ash had a line for everything. Not unlike Shepard, but hers were all someone else's words, hoarded for the right moment. She deployed them like weapons, while Shepard built his like any of his best work. Thoroughly, from the ground up. 

He'll have to build anew again. But he's never had a problem doing that.

The ship that rescues them carries only perfunctory weaponry, and it wouldn't hold even half of the Normandy's full crew. Privately owned, from one of the colonies, but the owners don't shoot them on sight or even demand compensation for taking them back into Alliance space. Kaidan takes down their information so they'll get it anyway. Crew and rescuers part ways at a fuel station, a few hours out again from the nearest mass relay. 

Another group, including Dr Chakwas, is already waiting there. Chakwas greets him warmly, more so than their working relationship warrants, but she probably feels the same knot of fear as he did, waiting for contact. Afraid of what all that silence could mean. 

"Not all the pods made it out of orbit," she explains, out of earshot of the rest of the assembled survivors from their own two pods. "I saw one go down with the wreckage. It was the most horrible thing, watching them fall into that planet and knowing there was nothing at all I could do. I just kept thinking, what if that were the Commander? As if the lives of everyone else didn't matter at all."

"Have you heard from Shepard?" Kaidan asks, as his chest clenches all over again. "Where is he?"

Chakwas closes her eyes. "I haven't heard from anyone but you, Lieutenant. Whatever that ship was, it scrambled our communications something terrible."

The faces flash before his mind's eye. Joker, who might not have willingly fled even if he could run. Liara, who'd run to find Shepard instead of into a pod. Adams, staying at the engines, trying to coax that extra bit of juice out of them on the off-chance it'd get them out of there. He rubs the spot under his brow where the headache's building, closes his own eyes for a moment. Nothing he can do for them now. "If anyone could make it out of that one, Shepard can," Kaidan says, opening his eyes again. 

"We'll have to hope so," Chakwas replies. 

The Alliance ship Kestrel reaches their fuel station within the hour. While she refuels, her crew escort the gathered survivors aboard and Kaidan finds himself reporting to the captain to give his full report. Neither his voice nor his hands shake as he explains, clearly and carefully, the arrival of the unknown cruiser and the heavy weaponry that cracked Normandy's hull like an egg. The captain nods her close-cropped black-haired head through each detail, mouth shut tight in a tired line.

"Received a few other distress calls from the vicinity. Sounds like a lot of pods made it out of the crash. Your crew did good, Lieutenant," she says when he's run out of things to add and simply falls silent. 

Kaidan can't take credit for that, but he thanks her anyway, since Shepard can't do it himself right now. He'll pass her praise along. Or she'll tell Shepard herself.

She lets Kaidan pace the bridge as they pull from the the depot and back toward the site of Normandy's great demise. The crackle of radio static pulls him up short every time, but there's no familiar voice to calm the jump of his frantic heartbeat. Names he doesn't recognise, coordinates far from the site of the crash, and eventually each of these hails reach an end. The captain doesn't move from her position, leaned forward on her elbows, watching the slowly growing star ahead.

It's too long before Alchera looms before them, pale grey and veined with red. Another hour passes as they cruise into range, marked only by the blips of the scanners and the bottle of water the navigator passes Kaidan about midway through. It's the same stale taste as any ship water. It could have come from the Normandy. And that's the kind of sentimentality that gets him into trouble. But it's still something.

The Normandy's water supply is probably drifting ice crystals, too small to see, or else frozen to the surface of Alchera itself. Out of reach to the living.

But the wreckage comes into view finally and it looks like it could all be frozen in space, only changing in proximity. Short range frequencies start crackling, people start moving around Kaidan, but he presses his arm all the more against the wall and keeps listening. These are voices he knows. Voices of the living. 

"Normandy Pod Zero Eight to Kestrel," says Adams over the comm link. "You're here for us, right? Do you read me?"

"We read you loud and clear, Zero Eight," the captain replies. "Opening shuttle bay now."

Kaidan pushes off the wall then, already crossing the room before he thinks to ask about other survivors. The line of pods separating from the debris barely registers; he didn't count them before turning from the window, and he's not turning back around now. This ship's no Normandy, but he's served on other vessels in his time and it's a straight enough line to the elevator and down to the loading bay. He takes it at a run.

It's another heart-clenching wait for the pods to finish landing and the airlock to shut. Kaidan counts then -- six of the remaining eight pods accounted for. Two and nine didn't make it. That's ten people who never got to safety, pulled in to freeze on Alchera. Or who never reached the pods at all, burnt or suffocated or pulled apart by the vacuum. Kaidan swallows hard. That could've been him. That could've been anyone. And it was someone, who served alongside him until a few hours ago, whose name he either did or didn't know. 

He's not sure which option is worse. 

Times like these a person's supposed to be grateful to be alive, most likely, but it doesn't seem fair at all, as the airlock clanks into place and the room pressurises, shutting out the dead and the doomed. Like a bomb on Virmire or an order to hold off attack. No matter the results, the cost will always feel too great. The difference between an N7 track commander and Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko is that the commander knows how to make those calls anyway. To say, this is the last of the survivors we anticipate. To say, we can't save everyone. And then live with it.

But if anyone can work out how to live with it, Shepard can. Or he'll fake it so convincingly that no one, certainly not Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko, could ever know for sure. Deliver a speech to rally the living, see them home safely, pass on the legacy of the dead, and then... go wherever a Spectre goes when his command's just been destroyed and there's no replacement waiting. And do his coping on his own time.

Maybe Kaidan can be there to have it together while Shepard figures it out. But he doesn't have it together now, as the doors open, as Chakwas and Alvarez and the rest gather around behind him, and the Kestrel's crew take their places.

The captain enters first, Kaidan and Chakwas immediately behind. People are climbing free of the pods already, offering hands back inside, bracing against the cold metal. Familiar faces. There's Adams, limping out, one leg distinctly charred. His whole face lights up when he sees them, and Chakwas is already stepping ahead to take his weight. Behind him, the rest of the engineering staff emerge -- all but Crosby and Tanaka. That pod must have been full to bursting, all seven of them packed inside, but they survived. They learned their lessons well about doing what they had to do. Shepard will be proud.

Shepard's not here yet.

Kaidan steps around the engineers, dropping a brief hand on Adams' shoulder to welcome him to safety. Behind them, marines and the bridge staff -- no sign of Pressley either -- and then Liara descends upon him and she's talking too quickly to catch how she began so Kaidan catches her instead, wrapping her in a tight hug as much for his own comfort as hers. "I tried to get him to safety, he wouldn't listen, oh, Kaidan," she says into his ear, and he squeezes her just a little bit tighter before releasing her. When she steps back, her wide eyes are shot with blood. "He was going after Joker."

Pod one is to the very back of the room, and no one's left it yet. Kaidan nods, and they both step toward it, staying within each other's orbits. Shepard's fine, of course, and this fear is baseless, but there's no proof of that yet. It's that moment before the rubble shifts and the hero stands again that hurts the most, like a bone lodged in his throat, like a stasis field he can't dispel. 

The door's jammed shut, but they wrench the pieces to their respective sides, biotics serving where mere muscle mass fails. Joker falls forward, like he'd been leaning against it, but Kaidan only half pays attention once they've caught him, looking past him to the empty chamber.

Empty.

"Joker," Liara says, and then breaks off, and Kaidan can't finish her question for her. Joker's face is enough.

"There was a hull breach," he says, voice dull, eyes on the middle distance, "and I couldn't -- he got me into the pod, but he didn't --"

Focus on what he can do. Kaidan pulls one of Joker's arms gently over his shoulders, and Liara takes the other, and they help him down and back toward the waiting crew. He favours his left side even more than usual but doesn't vocalise the pain it must be giving him. He grits his teeth. They all grit their teeth.

"And Commander Shepard?" the captain asks when they rejoin the rest of the gathered crowd, because someone has to bear that burden. Being the one to ask. Being the one to know. It was always Shepard who took that responsibility, before. He never looked away. He knew exactly who got spaced.

Kaidan will remember it like this: the smell of smoke clinging to them all, bruised and singed faces, Joker's armpit pressed against his shoulder, and the way the breath catches in all their throats as Joker shakes his head.


End file.
